Random wanderings through Azure and the .Net Micro Framework

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Monthly Archives: November 2015

My ADSL connection had been a bit flaky which had meant I had lost some sensor data with my initial Azure Event Hub gateway. In attempt make the solution more robust this version of the gateway queues unsent messages using the on-board MicroSD card support.

The code assumes that a file move is an “atomic operation”, so it streams the events received from the devices into a temporary directory (configurable) then moves them to the upload directory (configurable).

This code is proof of concept and needs to be soak tested, improved error handling and some additional multi threading locking added plus the magic constants refactored.

At CodeClub some of the students build a power consumption meter and as part of that project we measure the AnalogInput sample rates to check they are sufficient for our application.

Earlier this term when we measured the sampling rates in a CodeClub session we had a mix of Netduino 2 and Netduino 3 devices and some of the results differed from my previous observations. I used the same code on all the devices

The results for the Netduino 3 & Netduino 3 Ethernet were comparable with the Netduino Plus 2 in my earlier post. The reduction in the sampling rate of the Netduino 3 Wifi warrants some further investigation.

In a previous post I had started building a driver for the Seeedstudio Grove Dust Sensor. It was a proof of concept and it didn’t handle some edge cases well.

While building the pollution monitor with a student we started by simulating the negative occupancy of the Shinyei PPD42NJ Particle sensor with the Netduino’s on-board button. This worked and reduced initial complexity. But it also made it harder to simulate the button being pressed as the program launches (the on-board button is also the reset button), or simulate if the button was pressed at the start or end of the period.

Netduino 3 Wifi Test Harness

The first sample code processes button press interrupts and displays the values of the data1 & data2 parameters

After some testing we identified that the handling of button presses at the period boundaries was problematic and revised the code some more. We added a timer for the startup period to simplify the interrupt handling code.

Next steps – multi threading, extract code into a device driver and extend to support sensors like the SeeedStudio Smart dust Sensor which has two digital outputs, one for small particles (e.g. smoke) the other for larger particles (e.g. dust).